On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Nik Landauer wrote: #Hm. That is weird. :D # #(Though as you said, deice is cheating. And I don't think #I've ever seen the name Pierce written as Peirce.) Great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/index.htm It's a name. Names go weird. Weird: Northern or Scottish. OED says: The word is common in OE., but wanting in ME. until c1300, and then occurs chiefly in northern texts, though employed also by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. The normal later and modern form would have been wird, and the substitution of werd, werd [with long 'e'] (which is natural in south-eastern ME.) is difficult to account for in the northern dialects. In senses now current the word is either Scottish or archaic (chiefly under the influence of Scottish writers).] [OE., ME. = Old/Middle English -- DrW] -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel